


elysium

by inverse



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Future Fic, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-30
Updated: 2016-08-30
Packaged: 2018-07-28 05:55:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7627678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inverse/pseuds/inverse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>they return to a quieter earth. it is exactly what keith wants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	elysium

They all receive top military honours. Lance jokingly protests that a medal of valour and an internationally publicised ceremony during which they get to shake hands with a dozen heads of state is thoroughly underwhelming in exchange for having saved the entire universe, but the truth is that nobody on Earth is able to comprehend the full scale of what has happened. That is because nobody on Earth can comprehend the full scale of the universe as the five of them have experienced it, simply because so much of what has transpired over the last ten years has taken place outside of the limited scope of outer space as it is understood by Earth’s scientists.

In essence, they are rewarded for having survived.

The hunt for the missing crew members of the Kerberos mission as well as the three missing cadets from the Garrison had apparently petered off just months after the Blue Lion led them to Allura and Coran. It was not something that we were proud of, the Director of the Alliance admitted, shamefaced. But we did not know what we were dealing with. We didn’t have the means to investigate further. We knew that perhaps you were taken hostage by hostile alien forces, and evidence that we gathered from what remained of the equipment used on the Kerberos mission suggested so. But the technology we possessed wasn’t even advanced enough to allow us to conduct a probe beyond our own solar system, let alone sanction a rescue mission. We are so thankful you have returned safe, and so relieved. The apology went unsaid.

Their return, or at least the news of it, months afterwards, is greeted by equal parts joy and scepticism. People who knew of the disappearances, most of them members of the Garrison, cannot believe that they had survived a decade so far out in the universe. People who hadn’t heard of them at all or knew little about the matter believe that it was a hoax from the very beginning. After all, the authorities are careful to dress the Altean ship that returned them as part of an intergalactic rescue mission, and offer Altea – or what’s left of it – honorary membership to the Galaxy Alliance. Aliens have been the controversial subject of a number of conspiracy theories for years, and they aren’t understood yet. Until they are, everything must be kept under wraps, and explanations kept to the minimum. People have got questions for them. There are a couple of press ops, very carefully scripted.

That’s not to say that’s not a good outcome. Zarkon has been defeated, Galra’s imprisoned are freed, and the net result with respect to the rest of the universe is a positive one. As far as they know, there aren’t any other forces out to conquer the universe – at least not yet. Until it is once again needed, Voltron will remain in the Castle of Lions, and that could take another intergalactic war that spans another ten thousand years. Optimistically speaking, it should never be employed again.

 

*

 

They’re gathered in Hunk’s kitchen today. They do this every once in a while. Sitting atop the barstools surrounding the kitchen counters, chatting and waiting for Hunk to put the finishing details on his dishes of pot roast and root vegetable salad, it almost seems like their lives have returned, surreally, to normal, all in the blink of an eye. No more spacecrafts, no more wormholes, no more dwarf planets on the edge of implosion. Gravity is not the function of a nuclear generator but a natural occurrence of Earth’s laws of physics. But they’re all being watched. Occasionally Allura contacts Pidge via an Altean communication portal to update them on the whereabouts of the Castle of Lions and her efforts to patrol the galaxy and rescue stranded inhabitants of any remaining dying planets. Those conversations are being monitored, too.

Most times the topic inevitably turns to their inability to detail their time off Earth, regardless of what they started talking about in the first place.

“A gag order, really,” Lance huffs, crossing his arms. “I understand how this might all be too complicated for people to digest, but I still don’t see the point of hiding anything. There isn’t anything that needs to be hidden.”

“Patience, Lance. We’re working on codifying the exact extent of the universe’s reach, based on where we’ve travelled during our journey. I think it’s understandable that it’s off-topic until the information is presentable. We’re incorporating all the data that Allura left with us, though deciphering and converting that into a format that is readily readable and transmissible on Earth is,” Pidge pauses, looking almost annoyed, “difficult, to say the least.”

It’s been nearly six months since their return to Earth. Pidge’s father and brother were both rescued from Galran prisons, seven years from the time when they were captured. They made the journey back together with the Paladins, and now the three of them are committed to making sure that their lives’ work centres around cataloguing the pool of knowledge that Earth has yet to possess about the rest of the universe. When they first came back, the entire crew was treated with suspicion, just like the very first time Shiro crash-landed back to the Garrison in a Galra pod – all of them strapped up, tied down, and subjected to hours upon hours of interrogation and physical examination. One had to admit that Allura and Coran handled the entire sequence of events with far more magnanimity than they needed to. Only after the presentation of artifacts that corroborated the existence of an intergalactic war against the Galra and Voltron’s subsequent victory, the closing of a deal that saw the transferral of archives upon archives of data and technology, and some luck, were they all released, and a ceremony publicising their return arranged.

“I actually think everything has played out favourably all in all, Lance,” Shiro says. He taps his now-empty glass of soda thoughtfully against the countertop, twice. “We’ve all made it back home safely –” debatable, Keith thinks; and from the look on everyone else’s faces, they’re probably thinking the same thing – “and we’ve all reunited with our loved ones. I think that’s a miracle considering that there was a chance we’d never come back home in the first place, not in our lifetimes, and considering that Galran forces could have laid their hands on Earth before we returned. We beat Zarkon. I think we can afford to let this slide.”

“I agree,” Hunk adds, hovering over the oven, pot holders at the ready. “No offence to all the aliens out there who have been so hospitable to us, but I have definitely had my share of space grass and galactic bugs. It’s done, guys. Come help yourselves.”

Pidge is the first one to hop off the barstools, then Lance. A radio perched on the windowsill is playing something indistinguishable, a funky pop ditty that sounded just like any other. It’s a sunny day and a breeze is coming through the window. Keith turns to Shiro.

“You want to head out later?” he tries. “Good weather for flying.”

Shiro gives him a fond smile. “I could come along if you don’t mind. Your flying is always a pleasure to watch.”

“Are you coming to help or are you not, grumpyface?” Lance interrupts, narrowing his eyes in Keith’s direction.

“Only because I know you’re going to save the best bits for yourself and I’m going to stop you from doing that.”

“Let me help with the plates,” Shiro offers, and Lance immediately flounders, “I didn’t mean you!”

Back at the Garrison, they’ve become rockstars to every ambitious young man and woman who’s ever dreamt of exploring new frontiers in space – the ones who aren’t put off by the possibility that they’re hosts for alien parasites, at least. There hasn’t been much official press about their escapades, but rumours travel fast, and if you’re any potential Garrison explorer worth your salt, you would have dug up the surveillance footage of a blue, flying, feline robot floating around on underground Internet forums and the investigation records of the Kerberos mission and put two and two together. Pidge and Hunk are constantly being shadowed after hours by those more interested in lab work since they’re always updating the databases; conversely, Keith’s reputation as a pilot who’d aced all his practicums had preceded everything else about him, even his temper.

Both he and Lance have been appointed adjunct instructors despite never graduating formally from the academy, and students are free to approach them for pointers whenever they are on-site. For Lance, that’s on the days he travels from home to work in the hangar in shifts; for Keith, that’s often. The thrill of being a fighter pilot pales in comparison to piloting one of the Lions that make up Voltron. A fighter jet is a machine, but the Lions were alive, and they were sentient; no matter how advanced the technology, a jet doesn’t purr, it doesn’t warm up beneath your feet, its engine is still the sum of its parts and not greater than it, you never quite feel like you’ve become one with it, not after you’ve sat in the cockpit of a Lion and listened to it talk to you. The two of them would weave alongside each other and thread through the clouds as the cadets watched from the ground, but never go past the atmosphere. They haven’t been cleared to do that.

They would descend several minutes afterwards, chasing each other down to the airbase, and the cadets would swarm them with questions as they alighted. Keith would avoid talking about Voltron, but Lance would talk about everything they’d done in space, embellishing his stories ever so often to make it seem like he’d performed ninety percent of the heroics, when really, it was more like ten percent, and then remember that they’d been ordered not to talk about the battle against the Galra and sheepishly suggest that he was making everything up. His flying has improved leaps and bounds since – he insists – their brief time together as classmates, but some things stay the same.

Lance was the one who spent the most time in the hangar the day the ship was scheduled to leave Earth. Just before sunset, Pidge had went to get him, and Keith had followed; they found him mooning in front of the Blue Lion with a palm pressed to its forehead, no doubt in the middle of trying to communicate with it. “Maybe you should just leave together with the ship,” Pidge had said sarcastically, and Lance had replied, “Yeah, yeah, okay, coming.” Allura looked like she didn’t quite have the heart to tell him it was time for them to go. Faced with the choice between a lifetime of crusading the universe, risks attached, and a comfortable, loving, if somewhat unexciting existence surrounded by your family and friends, which would you pick? To fly a mile a millisecond is no longer exhilarating after you’ve moved a light year in the same measure of time. The relatively short lifespan of human beings and comparably long duration of space exploration and the complications involved, despite rapid and astonishing developments in the field, meant you chose one or the other. The wish of going further out into the great unknown meant accepting certain tradeoffs, and the need for safety and community meant foregoing the fulfilment of one’s wanderlust. Unless, of course, there was nothing left on Earth for you to miss. If there’s one thing that they’ve all learnt in the last decade, it’s that in the context of all existence, Earth is small. It’s so small. But it’s a place that they’ve been conditioned to think of as home.

Shiro delivers lectures about the essentials of space exploration. His students love him and constantly demand to see his alien arm. The Garrison won’t let him do anything else.

 

*

 

The shack in the middle of the Arizonian desert has been torn down. Presumably the Garrison found it while investigating why those three students had vanished ten years ago – and that one student who was expelled for disciplinary issues, maybe he had something to do with that. Look at all this sleuthing he’d done by himself. It’s out of this world. None of it makes sense. Maybe he was mental alright, just like we suspected. Destroy the place. Take everything else.

Initially Keith had wanted to build another one from scratch after he’d learnt the news. Go out in search of another good spot in the desert. He didn’t even question why he thought it would make sense to do so, simply possessing the notion that the starting point was to restore what used to be there, and then he would figure out where to go from there. Going backwards through all the time he’d spent in space, the shack was the last point of reference of his time on Earth, a catalogue of the one year he’d spent with himself, looking for answers. The Garrison never particularly felt like a place where he could settle down, even in his teens, just a place where he could quickly learn how to go elsewhere, and in the desert, one felt like they were closer to space. He didn’t think there was a better way of moving forward.

“You should come and live in the academy,” Shiro suggests when he finds out about the plan. The Garrison has taken him in, but Keith knows exactly what they’re doing. It’s because of that arm of his. “You’re gonna be all alone out there in the desert again. I don’t want that. You can work with the machines. Teach the cadets how to fly. I think you’d like that.” 

“I guess I would,” Keith agrees despite himself. “I would.” So the Garrison gives him a room in the instructor’s dormitories too, because it really wasn’t going to get any better than that.

Some nights they watch TV together in Shiro’s quarters, small but functional, almost cosy. Keith’s own room is two corridors away, bare except for his daily necessities. It’s a form of respite from their daily work, which is just taxing enough to keep them busy, but not complicated to the point that they’d be involved in any high-level missions. Sometimes when there’s too much work for Pidge to finish, which is often, she comes over and crashes on the couch instead of going home. A fireplace is a symbol of comfort; an artificial one burns merrily in a corner of the room. So is a television set. Keith doesn’t have a favourite TV show but remembers the cartoons he used to watch as a kid. Lots of Japanese anime about giant robots in space, dubbed over in bad English, watched on a hand-me-down tablet under his blanket in the orphanage. That was where he wanted to go after he left the place, the infinite vastness of space, where those chosen would eventually fulfill their destinies to become greater than anyone, including themselves, ever thought they could be. Shiro, on the other hand, has always preferred comedies, even back when Keith knew him in the Garrison as a teenager. Light-hearted things, easy on the mind, with a positive message at the end of every episode. That’s just the type of person he is; he wants a good ending for everybody. Entertainment on other planets took other forms, or did not seem to be much of a priority altogether.

“What’ll it be tonight?” Shiro asks, flipping through the channels. The Garrison has a well-stocked pantry for senior officers. Coffee, tea, cocoa, alcohol, whatever anyone wanted, they had it.

“I’m fine with anything you’d want to watch,” Keith says. The facilities aren’t bad either – far more comfortable than anybody would expect a military barracks to be, and nothing like the basic student dormitories that he remembered occupying as a cadet.

They settle for on one of the many news channels. Most of what’s available on TV here is news, and the rest are some old sitcoms. There isn’t a cable service. If you wanted to watch a movie, you could borrow a film from the library’s somewhat dated collection, or go out to the theatre on a designated day off. Keith heard from Hunk that a film studio wanted to make a movie about them. The Garrison commented on their behalf (“No comment”). Some evenings, if they’re so inclined, they move in closer to each other, warm and comfortable, talking over the sound of the television about what they’ve done throughout the day, and then some. The way they fit against each other has changed throughout the years, flesh tougher now, skin harder, but it is always familiar.

Ten years in space hasn’t really taught Keith anything about fucking; he never really was interested in that to begin with, anyway, just knew that according to lore people fucked each other if they loved each other, and the only way he knew how to love was to press nerve ending against nerve ending, fitting parts of each other into the alcoves of their bodies, a mouth against the slant of a neck, a hand against the curve of a waist, legs intertwined like twisting vines on a tree. It was the simplest way he knew how and it still is, the first time, the second, the tenth, the hundredth. To give and to receive as though they were equal parts of a whole. To merge and come apart, again and again and again.

“Keith,” Shiro breathes, hot against Keith’s ear, “Keith.” Behind him the television screen is glowing white and Keith can no longer hear what the presenter is saying.

“I’m here,” he exhales. He moves his hand off the curve of Shiro’s shoulder. Presses his fingers against the seam where skin meets metal and lets them linger there boldly and fondly. Reassures Shiro that nothing about him is inorganic.

Six months on Earth is a mere twentieth of a haunted decade in space. Time takes time.

 

*

 

“We’ve recently just arrived at a dwarf planet called Alkonost, all the way over here,” Allura explains, generating a map that appears on the intercom screen. One of the mice waves hello from where it is perched on her left shoulder. “It doesn’t have many inhabitants, primarily some very rudimentary life forms, but we’ve managed to locate some sources of food and fuel that are present on the planet. That should last us for quite a while. We’ll stay here a little longer to stock up before continuing our travels in the direction of the Midian star.” Behind her, the control room is full, its panels operated by various species of aliens that the Castle has taken in.

“It’s reassuring to see you again,” says Shiro. “We didn’t hear from you for a while, so we were beginning to worry.”

“We’re as good as can be,” Allura smiles sagely. “We might have to cut down on how often we get in touch in order to conserve the ship’s energy, seeing as we’re flying farther every voyage we make, but we’ve got some surprisingly good pilots and navigators on board now. Please don’t fret about us.”

The question on everyone’s minds is – has the Garrison or the Alliance tried to make contact with the Castle? Allura doesn’t bring up the matter, so the best they can do is to assume that the answer is in the negative. Besides, the Alteans are such a trusting, steadfast people, and Allura is more than equipped with the tactical finesse to handle anything the Alliance will throw at her.

Pidge’s office is a mess. There’s a collage of pictures that frames part of the composite screens that Pidge works off, old and new, all of them of her family. One can see the progression: Katie the newborn with a grinning father and glowing mother and a bratty-looking preschooler for a brother; Katie the infant on vacation with them all at what seems to be a carnival fair; Katie with long hair at a formal dinner, intelligent-looking, almost mischievous, and in fact all four of them seem to be carriers of those same traits, eyes curious and inquisitive; and then the last one, not Katie-as-Katie but Katie-as-Pidge, short hair, big round glasses, twenty-four whole years of age, flagging her parents with Matt, the passage of time all too clear for all to see, and startlingly obvious on none other than Mrs. Holt herself, ten years of solitude painting her hair white with streaks of straw blonde. Documents and diagrams alike are pinned to the walls, and days-old mugs of coffee litter the surface of the table. Keith leans back in the rickety office chair he is occupying, and it responds with a defiant creak.

“Sorry, but we’ve got loads of questions for you, Allura,” Hunk begins hurriedly. He’s bent over a stack of papers and flipping through them, looking for just the right one. “I know we haven’t got much time, but it’d be good if you could just answer some of them. That’d be helpful.”

“Uh, I got questions, too,” Lance interrupts, waving an annoyed Hunk off. “Have you guys found replacement Paladins yet? I bet the Lions need quite a bit of exercise after sitting in the ship for months. But I’m sure you won’t be able to find better candidates than the five people talking to you right now, so you can go ahead and tell whoever’s on the job that they won’t be able to do it better than us. That’s just fact, and we’re not sorry.”

“Now is not the time, Lance,” Allura replies, slightly cross, “but no, we haven’t got replacement Paladins. Being a Paladin of Voltron requires unwavering commitment and courage. Suffice to say, I would not select just about anybody to be a Paladin when such an important responsibility is at stake.”

“Serves you right, Lance,” Hunk and Pidge exclaim in unison, and Lance shrugs in response. Keith turns to look at Shiro, and finds that a knowing glance is already waiting for him. In all honesty, however, he can’t say with certainty that he doesn’t want to know what’s happened to the Lions, either.

The meeting comes to an end after an hour; Allura is needed elsewhere onboard.

“Let us know if you need anything, Allura,” says Shiro determinedly. “We can’t be sure if the Alliance will assist you with every request, but we will do our best to persuade them in the event that they don’t.”

“That would be very much appreciated,” replies Allura.

“We miss you, princess,” Lance finishes, blowing her a playful kiss, at which she rolls her eyes a little, but there’s a hint of a smile on her face. “Don’t take what I said to heart.”

 

*

 

On the nights Shiro feels like he’s had a long day and wants to be alone and tells Keith goodnight before gently shutting the door to his room, Keith goes out to the cliffs left of the hangar. The cliffs comprise the leftmost border of the Garrison and look out towards the desert, though a different part of it from where Keith used to reside. It’s as good a place as any other to get a good look at the sky, at the true state of space from the point of view of Earth, all scant lights and absolute darkness. Parking his scooter some distance away, Keith walks towards the very edge and lies back down on the ground. From here all his eyes can see is a slate of pure midnight, dotted with stars, misted with clouds. He used to do this as a cadet, too, and the positions of the stars have hardly shifted since then; the only difference is that he is reminiscing instead of wondering. Remembers weaving between galaxies instead of thinking about what it’d be like to do that. Excited about the prospect of his first mission. They already had plans to send him, but not before he underwent another year or two of practical training. These nights, the feeling that he gets when he stares up into the sky like this is a twinge of regret. He hasn’t seen enough. Hasn’t flown enough. They passed so many planets by fighting Zarkon, or even if they landed, they were on a rescue mission, or looking for shelter from battle. Keith knows that’s a noble cause. He almost feels contrite about missing the feeling of flying under real pressure. About wishing for more of something he’s already been given a shot at. He stares hard at the gaps between the stars and loses himself thinking about how he hasn’t had enough and how the solid ground against his back doesn’t matter. “You can go anywhere you want, kid,” said one of his professors, years ago. “Go as far as you can,” said another. “Next time, you can come with me,” said Shiro, before he left.

 

*

 

It’s time for their quarterly inspection. Keith reports to the labs on a mundane Tuesday afternoon. The process consists of an hour-long interview, a reflex test, a brain wave scan, a general x-ray, and some other miscellaneous tests. Nothing inconsistent turns up, and it’s revealed that he’s still human within the limits of reason. No strange growths. No extra bones. The head scientist looks almost dissatisfied that they didn’t find anything new. He gives Keith a once-over at the end of the inspection, then hands him his papers with a grunt and waits for Keith to sign all thirteen pages. Keith doesn’t read them. He already knows what they say.

He bumps into Lance in the lift lobby. It’s a restricted area, accessible only via high-level staff passes, which they don’t possess, or administrative permission, which was how they got into the place.

“‘Sup,” Lance waves. “That was stressful. I got poked at everywhere. Fancy a drink?”

They visit a bar not far from the Garrison, just half an hour’s ride away into the next town. Lance drives them. He bought the car as a gift for his mother from the money he got from the compensation package. Keith never used to come here, but according to Lance, he and Hunk used to sneak out there sometimes when they were cadets – not to the bar, of course, but the town was more or less regarded as the nearest source of entertainment for the students who lived in the dormitories, with its modest family restaurants, thrift stores, and farmer’s markets. It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary to see an instructor or two hanging out at the pubs on a weekend. Lance orders a stout. Keith gets whatever’s available on tap. He’s never really been big on alcohol, and has found that no matter which planet he’s on, any drink designed to intoxicate always tastes foul to some extent.

Lance blubbers on and on about what he’s doing outside of the Garrison these days. He’s dating a girl he used to know from his childhood, and they had never been particularly close before, but now they’re at the point where Lance’s parents already want them to settle down (“Have you told her about that incident on Qiri V55 –” “ _Shut your quiznak_ , Keith”). Keith mostly listens half-heartedly and gives the occasional rebuff when Lance starts throwing out all sorts of stupid ideas for their hypothetical wedding, but then he sobers up suddenly, and Keith really begins to listen.

“Do you think it’s right?” Lance asks. “For all of this to be happening?”

“What do you mean,” Keith replies, even though he knows exactly what Lance means.

“We’re supposed to be safe back home, right,” Lance begins to explain, brows furrowing as he looks for the right words. “So we are now. Safe. We’re all happy, right? Our basic needs guaranteed for life; housing, food, employment, everything’s provided for… It’s just that this isn’t what I thought things would become if I joined the Garrison. I can’t just stay here like a sitting duck for the rest of my life. I know you think I’m dumb, Keith – I’ve seen you looking at me that way all these years – but I’m way more perceptive than that. I’m smarter than you, even. We’re not going anywhere anymore, are we?”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t expect any of this at all. We were lost in space for ten years,” Keith tells him. “There’s just no way to prove what we did.”

“I think about this a lot,” Lance says, swirling around the liquid in his glass with a few absentminded twirls of his wrist. “Maybe Allura could come get us. Heck, I’d bring my entire family. But when I think about how they’d miss home like I did for all those years – maybe not. I’d love to show them what I saw. But I wouldn’t want for them to be upset about being away from here. I know I was. There’s just no satisfying me now, either way.”

“You don’t know. Maybe they’d be delighted, as long as all of you were together.”

“Then what about you?” Lance asks. Keith hates it when Lance gets serious; it feels like a competition. “Never thought about just stealing a jet from the hangar, fly out into the atmosphere all alone? Issue a distress signal for the Castle? Allura and Coran will come right by and scoop you up, I guarantee that.”

“You really want me to do that? Not sure I want to get you guys thrown back into the interrogation rooms just because I wanted to be somewhere else.”

“I hate it when you make sense, you know?” Lance says. He tilts his glass towards Keith, who returns the gesture with a clink of his own. “Cheers, bud.”

Shiro isn’t in his quarters when Keith returns. He sits at Shiro’s desk, flips idly through a few of the assignments that he’s marking, and scoffs at some of the preposterous answers given. There are a couple of outstanding answers, though nothing stellar; Keith remembers his cohort as being much more brilliant and inquisitive, if not entirely correct at times. He takes his time to read through them, resisting the urge to scribble disdainful comments in the margins with pencil, then when he’s done, switches on the handmade planetarium that Shiro’s had as a personal project for a couple of months already. It incorporates some of the data that they’ve come across during their time in the Castle. He used to have one as a cadet as well, a smaller one, limited to Earth’s own neighbourhood; he’d asked Keith to help work on it, but he wasn’t able to contribute much. Shiro was so sharp back then, and his mind worked so fast; he’s still good now, but slower.

“You’re early today,” Shiro announces when he finally comes in, interrupting Keith’s inspection of one particular asteroid belt in the middle of the ceiling.

“Didn’t feel like flying,” Keith said. “How was your test?”

“Nothing irregular,” Shiro says blandly. His arms are hidden beneath his coat; Keith can’t see them. “I went to see Pidge and Hunk earlier. Their results turned out normal as well.”

Keith nods. “What’s for supper?”

They don’t watch TV that night. Instead they lie in bed, tangled together quietly. From the window on the adjacent wall, Keith can see miles of desert land beneath, and then the sky above it. The stars can’t be seen distinctly at this distance; instead, they present as speckles of white dust. Shiro never says much on inspection days, but Keith indulges his silence and holds him closely so that he can feel that he’s still a whole being completely put together. There is a difference between knowing it and understanding it, but Shiro might finally get there someday, finally, finally, after a long while.

“Keith,” he says just before he closes his eyes, “I can never take Earth’s safety for granted. If Allura and Coran ever need my help someday – if Voltron needs me – I’ll definitely go to their aid.”

“I know,” Keith replies. “I’ll do the same. You know that.”

Shiro falls asleep with some difficulty, moving ever so slightly against Keith as he does. Shortly after, when constant rumination finally loses its appeal, Keith tries to sleep, too. He looks away from the window. Takes a slow, deep breath. Keeps one eye open.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm a little conflicted about this fic because it projects so far into the future without us knowing the exact details of what's going to take place throughout the series. a lot of it is based on the question "what's going to happen to the paladins if and when they eventually return to earth?", so the best i could do without much information, really, was to apply the current state of our paladins and fast forward approximately ten years, without much change to the status quo, so like, take the setting with a pinch of salt. i did think it was a pertinent question based on how the garrison reacted to shiro's return from galra, and it's not implausible that the paladins would end up in a situation like this, even if, you know, kids' cartoons are supposed to have a happy ending. honestly more of a genfic and sort of a thought experiment/exercise in mood but since i ship sheith there's sheith in here, deal with it.
> 
> p.s. come and talk to me about voltron on [twitter](https://twitter.com/quippering) plsssss :((((


End file.
